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122 Irving Howe Triple Thinker John Rodden Irving Howe (1920–1993) was a vocal radical humanist and the most influential American socialist intellectual of his generation. Howe was also, in my view, the last major American public intellectual—certainly the last of the Old Left. Not only was he prolific—he wrote eighteen books, edited twenty-five more, penned dozens of articles and reviews, and edited Dissent for forty years—but he was proficient and more often brilliant in virtually every literary endeavor of his mature years. Although some readers may find his work on the relationship between politics and literature to be most valuable, I believe that his contributions to the study of Yiddish literature and Jewish immigrant history are most likely to last.1 Indeed, it is quite possible that Howe’s work will endure longer than that of the elder generation of New York Intellectuals in whose shadow he sometimes found himself.2 Not only is much of his rich oeuvre of literary and political criticism still in print, but Dissent, which Howe faithfully edited for four decades, celebrated its fiftieth year of publication in 2004. Woody Allen’s joke two decades ago in Annie Hall that the magazine should merge with the neoconservative journal Commentary and be renamed Dysentery elicits today no more than a smile from serious readers. Allen’s movie has become a period piece, whereas Dissent continues to represent the distinctive voice of American social democracy and radical humanism. Of Celebrations and Attacks Yes, Irving Howe had his admirers—and his detractors. “Irving made a lot of enemies in his lifetime,” recalled Robert Boyers, an intellectual and friend on the left. Indeed Howe was fond of the remark of WilMorris_FINAL .indb 122 Morris_FINAL.indb 122 9/25/2008 8:13:43 AM 9/25/2008 8:13:43 AM Irving Howe 123 liam Dean Howells that anyone could make enemies but the real test was to keep them. By that criterion, he succeeded well. Though he occasionally reconciled after falling out (with a few writer-intellectuals, such as Lionel Trilling and Ralph Ellison, and a few New Leftists, such as Jack Newfield, Carl Oglesby, and Todd Gitlin), Howe made and kept an impressive number of enemies. Howe’s chief enemies and most severe critics included onetime friends and colleagues in his New York circle who had moved to the right in the late 1960s and 1970s: Hilton Kramer, Norman Podhoretz, Saul Bellow, Midge Decter, Joseph Epstein, and Sidney Hook. But other harsh critics stayed on the political or cultural left—and disapproved of Howe’s moderate socialism—or moved even farther leftward, such as Alexander Cockburn, Philip Rahv, and the majority of those New Left leaders whom Howe had excoriated in Dissent’s pages. Still other opponents, such as Richard Kostelanetz and Philip Roth, were literary or aesthetic rather than explicitly political adversaries. For instance, Bellow dismissed Howe as “an old-fashioned lady.”3 Roth, upset over Howe’s attack on Portnoy’s Complaint as reinforcing Jewish stereotypes, parodied him as Milton Appel, a “sententious bastard. . . . A head wasn’t enough for Appel; he tore you limb from limb.”4 Other foes attacked Howe as a critic-shark who patrolled New York’s cultural currents. During the late 1960s, when acrimonious differences over the Vietnam War and the counterculture split American intellectuals into rival camps, the poet Robert Lowell lambasted Howe as the archetypal “New York Intellectual,”5 an elitist radical looking down on humankind. Lowell wrote in his sardonic poem, “The New York Intellectual” (1967): Did Irving really want three hundred words? . . . How often one would choose the poorman’s provincial out of town West Side intellectual for the great brazen rhetorical serpent swimming the current with his iron smile!6 In the early 1970s, Philip Nobile mocked Howe as “the Lou Gehrig of the Old Left, . . . who is always there when you need him with a clutch position paper on the Cold War, Vietnam, Eugene McCarthy, confrontation or sexual politics .” Nobile added that Howe often assumed a gatekeeping or policeman’s role, “serv[ing] as the Left’s chief of protocol, correcting the manners of apocalypticians and calling for coalitions always and everywhere.”7 To Lowell and Nobile, Howe was an American commissar imbued with the joy of sects, an intellectual iron man whose pen never ran dry. Or, as Nobile once remarked of Howe’s circle: “They must be New York intellectuals. See how they loathe one another.”8 By...

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